The growth of residential broadband service demands extension of Ethernet connectivity across networks. Accordingly, communication bandwidth is accelerated on the transport network. In today's era, service providers should focus on being able to provide sufficient bandwidth to support all possible communication options available at this point in time as well as any services that evolve in the future.
Dynamic networks like Metro Ethernet Access networks are used by service providers to provide a variety of services such as those defined by the Metro Ethernet forum. A Metro Ethernet is a computer network based on the Ethernet standard whose size most often falls between LAN's and WAN's. A Metro Ethernet network can typically cover an area anywhere between a small group of buildings to an entire city. It is commonly used as a metropolitan access network to offer network and application based services to enterprise and residential customers.
Service providers using the Metro Ethernet are most often bound by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that goes hand-in-hand with the service being offered to the customer. SLA is a type of a service contract that specifies certain performance characteristics, like capacity and bandwidth to be guaranteed by the service provider. Before activation of a new service, the service provider ensures that the capacity being promised is met by the underlying access network, complying with the terms put forth by the SLA.
In order to satisfy SLA requirements service providers employ up-to-date information about the available capacity of the network. In dynamic networks however, service providers are faced with the challenge of keeping track of dynamically changing capacity. Dynamic networks are extended by service providers to increase reachability or bandwidth causing a change in the available capacity. Capacity can be increased by replacing low capacity nodes or links with those having a higher capacity. Moreover, a change in capacity may occur due to various other reasons, for example, failure of nodes or links could also cause a change in capacity.
Conventionally, to meet the SLA requirements, service providers manually monitor this dynamically changing capacity manually thereafter attempting to make accurate decisions regarding activation of new services. Keeping track of the changes in capacity and entering information manually each time a change occurs can be extremely cumbersome and expensive. Moreover, manual monitoring and tracking can often lead to inaccurate reporting and thereafter, to incorrect system modifications.